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COPYRIGHT 1994 University of Illinois Press
There are about 10,000 letters extant from Strindberg's hands, a small number compared to the vast correspondence of Shaw or Voltaire, but a goodly number when set next to Ibsen's meager output. In this edition of Strindberg's correspondence, the first collection in English, Michael Robinson has selected 679 letters, most of them printed in their entirety. For his annotations Robinson has relied mainly on the monumental Swedish edition of the letters, begun in 1948, with Torsten Eklund as chief editor. That edition is still incomplete, but Robinson has been able to draw on the remaining unedited letters for the last three years of Strindberg's life, 1909 to 1912.
The correspondence is published in two volumes, 1862 to 1892, and 1892 to 1912. This is altogether appropriate and almost inevitable, given the fact that the most striking feature of Strindberg's extraordinary life was that it was divided into two halves, separated by the great mental and artistic crisis in the mid-1890s, which he called his Inferno. In the latter part of his life he repudiated nearly everything that he had stood for earlier. The naturalist became a symbolist; the agnostic became a Swedenborgian; and the postivist who put his faith in cause and effect became the advocate of synchronicity. People as well as ideas underwent a transformation. To the brash, young Strindberg, Darwin was a god, he himself the Antichrist [letter Of 23 July 1894], Jesus, "a little degenerate, asexual sophist" [25 May 1888], Shakespeare a "bumkin actor" [19 January 1889], and Beethoven a babbler [30 September 1872]. But after he had been purged in the fires of the Inferno, Darwin appeared as the Baal of the ape-men, Jesus the gentle savior, Shakespeare the most admired of dramatists, and Beethoven the greatest of all creative artists and the supreme solace of his last years.
A few things did not change. The intensity of his feelings and the passion of his beliefs remained undiminished. As a young man he had claimed that his fire was the fiercest and brightest in Sweden, and that remained true until his death. And...
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